Study sheds light on how reams of fake scientific papers are getting into literature
Fraudulent scientific research is now being produced and published on a large scale, with some unethical researchers colluding with unethical editors to attain the prestige that comes with publication, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Among their efforts, the researchers who conducted the study obtained about 47,000 retracted articles. They collected reports of the same image used in multiple publications. They compiled 33,000 papers of suspicious origin. Making use of the fact that editors’ names are public at some science publishers, they looked at whether some editors handled disproportionate numbers of problematic scientific papers, ones that were later retracted or noted negatively by other scientists.
At the journal PLOS One, they were able to link 30.2% of the retracted articles to 45 editors. Of these editors, 25 had their own papers retracted. The 45 editors represented 0.25% of the total number of editors at the journal.
